1. Field
Aspects disclosed herein pertain to a communication system that selectively collects and analyzes fault data from a population of mobile communication devices, and in particular discriminates fault collection and reporting to particular software and hardware components of a mobile computing platform.
2. Background
Advances in technology have resulted in smaller and more powerful personal computing devices. For example, there currently exist a variety of portable personal computing devices, including wireless computing devices, such as portable wireless telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and paging devices that are each small, lightweight, and can be easily carried by users. Consumers are increasingly offered many types of electronic devices that can be provisioned with an array of software applications. Distinct features such as email, Internet browsing, game playing, address book, calendar, media players, electronic book viewing, voice communication, directory services, etc., increasingly are selectable applications that can be loaded on a multi-function device such as a smart phone, portable game console, or hand-held computer.
Even with these advances, mobile communication devices tend to have communication bandwidth, processing, and user interface constraints over general purpose computing devices. For example, the screen size, amount of available memory and file system space, amount of input and output capabilities and processing capability may each be limited by the small size of the device. Because of such severe resource constraints, the computing platforms for such devices are often optimized for a particular telephone chipset and user interface hardware. As such, generally applicable solutions are typically not suitable to a population of wireless mobile devices.
Despite these challenges, today most of the mobile/wireless devices have the capabilities to access various wireless broadband networks. In fact, the rapid advances in technology, mass market adoption, standardization, and globalization enabled various companies to collaborate in bringing innovate and compelling services to the market. This collaboration led to the formation of a wireless/mobile service “Eco System” consisting of radio access network (RAN) technology providers, mobile computing platform providers, mobile device manufactures (aka original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and wireless broadband service providers (WBSP). With the advent of wireless multicast systems (e.g., Forward Link Only (FLO) and Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H)) and their convergence with wireless broadband systems, the Eco System is growing further with Wireless Multicast Service Providers (WMSP) that distribute for content providers.
While the Eco System is able to provide compelling services such as mobile television, mobile Internet etc., the mobile computing platforms/devices that are necessary for accessing these services require complex technology integration from various players in the Eco System. Due to the pace of innovation, competition and other market forces, there is an enormous pressure on Eco System partners to bring new products and services to market. This is leading to shorter cycle time to market and increased expectations on the reliability of the services, applications and devices. Testing processes to ensure reliability and quality of various mobile/wireless devices, services and (or) applications before launching to market has become quite complex. Moreover simulating all kinds of field failure conditions in the lab environment does not provide adequate infrastructure to find the latent bugs that cause failures in the hardware and software systems besides consuming time and resources. However the Eco System partners are faced with critical decisions often without adequate testing or data which is critical to establish the reliability of the hardware and software.
After the mobile device or application or service is launched, often latent bugs are manifested in field conditions resulting the following issues: (a) increase call volume due to customer complaints; (b) inability to troubleshoot and isolate the actual bugs due to inadequate information to duplicate the conditions that resulted in the failure; (c) increased time to isolate bugs and assign ownership; (d) lost revenue due to increased churn of subscribers; (e) recalling large number of devices causing lost revenue for all the players in the Eco System; and (f) poor customer satisfaction.
However, the wireless/mobile devices and the communication networks that service them are still constrained by the capabilities available to address the problem. Excessive emphasis on isolating bugs can come at the expense of the performance of these devices to perform their intended functions, also causing reduction in quality of service and performance, and thus customer satisfaction for devices that are not malfunctioning.